Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday September 16, 2012 @08:03PM
from the pack-it-up dept.

Endeavour will be the second of NASA's space shuttles to leave the Kennedy Space Center. The ship will piggyback on top of a specially modified 747 and head to a Los Angeles museum this week. From the article: "Endeavour's lifespan was relatively short by shuttle standards - 25 missions over 20 years, totaling 299 days in space.
But those flights ran the gamut of orbital odysseys, including the sheer moxie of its May 1992 debut when three astronauts made an impromptu and unprecedented spacewalk to rescue a stranded Intelsat communications satellite."

It should, it still ticks me off that Seattle didn't get one of them despite the areas contributions to flight in general. What's more they sent most of them to New England leaving the closest actual shuttle to there in CA.

OTOH, we did end up with a trainer, so it isn't all bad, you can actually go inside that. But the politics of who did and didn't get a shuttle was pretty disgusting.

Sour grapes much? The shuttle and the main engines were all built in Southern California. Edwards AFB was the backup landing site and the test site for Enterprise. Not to mention the enormous contributions to other parts of the space program and aerospace in general made by our area. Obviously the Houston area played a big role in the shuttle program as well, and I'm not here to put one area over the other, but I'm just saying that the LA area has every bit as good of a claim to a shuttle as Houston

Powerful fairy god-senators and other people in high places. It seems like that was one of the last things Hillary Clinton did before she resigned from the U.S. Senate to become Secretary of State, and some other high profile people also had a significant role in getting the vehicle assigned to NYC.

Another consideration for NYC was also that it was in the center of a very large portion of the American population, where nearly a hundred million people were within a few hours drive of the museum that is hous

Also, the most visitors of any other US city, by far. If you want people to see these things, they need to go where the people are. I understand that Houston had massive contributions to the space program, much more than NYC, or even the northeast, in general, but how many people visit Houston per year?

That's an interesting point. How many people do visit Houston every year? I don't know the answer to that. It would be easy enough to Google but why bother since this is a done deal. I do know that if anything people might want to see that could or should be in Houston gets moved to say.... New York City then the number of people who visit Houston will never increase while the number of things to see in New York City will continue to grow leading to more and more people visiting New York City. Funny how tha

I do think that there should be something worth seeing in Houston, and wish that they'd have gotten one, but the point of my comment was that NASA, and the museums that have the orbiters, now, should use these as tools to increase interest in math, sciences, and space travel. I was trying to convey the point that they're better tools in a high visibility area than in an area that would offer fewer visitors. From what I've seen, Houston pulls 7 million visitors per year. The Intrepid museum itself draws o

Unless the weather between Kennedy Space Center and Houston improves (which the forecast is not looking good), the shuttle may end up bypassing all of the planned overflights and visits and end up going directly to Los Angeles. This includes overflights at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi (originally planned for this morning, cancelled), Michoud Space Facility in New Orleans east (cancelled due to weather) and the overflight of the Johnson Space Center and overnight visits at Ellington Field in Houston

And hundreds of street trees are being cut down [cnn.com]. Street trees are not only aesthetic, but they provide shade to pedestrians (reducing VMT), protect pedestrians from cars jumping the curb, and provide shade to adjacent buildings, reducing energy consumption.

But just on aesthetics alone, the resultant concrete jungle visual blight will drag down that local economy far more than a space shuttle tourist attraction. The shuttle will be long forgotten before replacement trees can be grown.

<quote> The shuttle will be long forgotten before replacement trees can be grown.</quote>

NASA is taking the most environmentally conscious route possible, so much so that they re-routed the transport of the shuttle to preserve the most trees. That said, somehow local flora (which they are replanting) is more historically significant than a vehicle that inspires us to transcend our own planetary existence?

I just remember the last time my city was doing something and asked to remove a tree from our property. We agreed after minor reluctance, and the city left a giant stump in our yard after implying that the whole thing was being removed. Hopefully they'll honor their word by replacing the trees they cut down proper, not leaving the space empty and planting trees elsewhere sometime down the line.

The space shuttle didn't "inspire us to transcend our own planetary existence". It mostly bogged us down in low earth orbit for 30 years, squandering money that could have better gone elsewhere, and doing very little that was inspiring or transcendent. In fact it mostly helped shackle us to our earth bound planetary existence.

The one possible exception would the Hubble launch and repair missions. The Hubble was pretty inspiring and the Shuttle's capabilities made it possible both in salvaging it from bei

The problem with the Space Shuttle wasn't the vehicle itself or even having it built. The problem is that it became a dead end technology because nothing was built upon the engineering learned from building it. The engineers who designed the Space Shuttle are now retired, and the follow on projects have also been canceled. If there has been a "Shuttle Mark 2" or some other follow up vehicle that largely did the same thing but using more modern materials, learned from engineering mistakes, and avoided som

The reason why they never built a "Shuttle 2" was because Shuttle 1 was absurdly enormous, NASA wanted a shuttle but the only way they were going to get funding for it was if they (and did) talk the Air Force in to paying for half of it by using it to launch all of their spy sattelites. Now that it had become a weapon of the cold war in space, it needed millitary capabilities like a 1,000 mile glide range (hence the giant wings, note that all the "stubby shuttles" barely have any wings at all) and a payload

If you think you are going to get in to space on the shuttle then you must be a billionaire because it is prohibitively expensive to fly anyone in to space that way without huge taxpayer subsidies.

If you actually want to get in to space, common sense dictates you should be advocating SpaceX Falcon and not space shuttle. Then you only need $10-20 million instead of the several $100 million a shuttle ride would cost you without taxpayer subsidies.

The whole problem with the Space Shuttle is it proved to be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than every other launch option. In part because of the huge amount of dead weight being lifted to orbit, and mostly because of the huge work force and logisticial train required to refurbish and refit it between each launch.

Unless you have unlimited amounts of money at your disposal, successful access to space is almost entirely about how many dollars it costs to lift a kilogram/pound in to low earth o

I should note that there certainly have been several [wikipedia.org] different kinds [wikipedia.org] of follow up [wikipedia.org] projects [wikipedia.org] which have been proposed [wikipedia.org], including a couple [wikipedia.org] of projects [wikipedia.org] put forward by the U.S. Air Force that started with NASA participation and the USAF simply took over the projects altogether.

If it was such a bad idea, why have repeated efforts been done to extend the technology? It is being abandoned by the Manned Spaceflight Office, but it certainly hasn't been proven to be a bad idea... or rather there are several people wh

That Dyna-Soar you linked to was designed in the 50's and prototypes were built in the 60's. It represented the baseline for the shuttle we got. The rationale is that we don't need to go in to space to abduct russian spy sattelites from orbit (AFAIK we never tested this capability), and we don't need a human pilotable craft to do it even if we did. Even the Russians were scratching their heads as to why the hell we built the shuttle. They only built the Buran because they figured there must be some inherent

yeah, missing the X-37 was a mistake of mine. I caught it after I hit the "submit" buttom.... but I figured that the gist of the conversation was apparent.

Regardless, it is in America where the most diversity of ideas are coming from in terms of crewed spaceflight vehicles is coming from. Two different reusable shuttle designs are coming from private industry, including the Lynx [wikipedia.org], being built by XCor and Dream chaser [wikipedia.org] being built by Sierra Nevada.

It's unfortunate that the trees need to be removed, but twice as many will be planted to replace them.

And we're not talking about old-growth forrests here... every other year I hear about LA losing more trees than this to disease, pollution, or invasive species (Chinese elm beetles, anyone?). The only difference is that this year it's intentional, but I wouldn't have assumed any of these trees would have survived for decades to come, anyhow.

And more to the point, if your neighborhood goes from nice to "blighted" by the loss of a few trees, you've got some serious problems which should be addressed, immediately.

More to the point, the trees being cut are mostly Ficus trees which destroy sidewalks and cost the city a huge amount of money, and they are not in any way original or ancient (they were popular because they grow really fast). They are to be replaced with twice as many trees, of different species that do not have invasive surface roots.

They are "focusing" on trees that are already marked for removal (or considered for removal) by various projects. I could only find one source that mentioned the CSC is spending $500,000 to improve the streets (which I assume includes replanting the trees). Given the orbiter itself cost over $5.5 million dollars per day in orbit, $500,000 doesn't seem like much hush money.

Standard Headlinese [princeton.edu] (don't look at me that way - click the link). Awkward, but in no way a/. schtick. I assumed that every regular reader of news in English is used to decoding it without even thinking about it.

In this case, they saved exactly four characters compared to "Shuttle Endeavour will embark to a Los Angeles Museum", eight if you wanted an article too.

I'm kind of miffed that a state with the second largest population, located centrally within the south, with 3 of the 10 largest cities in the US and deep ties to NASA (Texas) didn't get one of the 4 shuttles. Then again, we kind of did get Columbia...